Witch Mountain On Why the Future is Doomed, Partially Because of "Your Corrupt Ways"

At the end of September, doom mainstays Witch Mountain will release their fourth full-length, Mobile of Angels. The album is the band’s best material to date, and as recent news has revealed it will be their last with vocalist Uta Plotkin. While Plotkin’s absence is a formidable obstacle for future endeavors from Witch Mountain, the band’s history has time and again shown them to be resilient and unhindered in their approach to everything they do. Drummer and founding member Nathan Carson is well aware of the intricacies that come with band dynamics both musically and personally as his booking agency, Nanotear, boasts an incredible lineup of bands both old and new across the spectrum of heavy music. Carson recently spoke to Noisey about Witch Mountain’s upcoming release, the band’s history, and why the future is doomed (in a good way).

Check out the results below, but stream "You Corrupt Ways" from Mobile of Angels before you do.

Noisey: Witch Mountain has been a band since around 1997, and now with Mobile of Angels you’ve got your fourth full-length, and I’m curious to know what goes into this for you guys at this point. Is it different each time, or has the band sort of found a creative groove that works best?
Nathan Carson: Well, I think Cauldron helped us lay the blueprint for how we liked to write an album, and it really came down to Rob going in the basement for the winter and writing riffs, and he would shoot them over to Uta who would add in her lyrical ideas and vocals melodies and then as a band we would just hash out the final arrangements. It starts with Rob from a musical standpoint, and goes through several filters, and by the end, we’ve all sort of gotten our two cents in. I tend to be more interested in arrangements and dynamics and drama, and the other guys have their areas of expertise. I feel like by the time we’ve all looked them over and listened to them and rehearsed them, they’re as good as we can make them in the time that we have allotted. Of course it would be a luxury to be able to tour the material fully before we went into the studio, but that wasn’t in the cards this time because we literally mastered the album the day before we got on our flights for Europe.

It’s funny you mention that hectic touring schedule because that’s something you’re well versed in with your booking agency, Nanotear. Is that experience of dealing with touring, booking bands, and even with egos something you see helping how Witch Mountain operates?
Yeah, I think it’s all invaluable experience. I learned to book by booking Witch Mountain tours, so it’s really as DIY a scenario as you can possibly imagine. I’ve just tried to take it into a very professional realm for a long period of time. It’s my job to deal with the fragile egos of dozens and dozens of artists, and I think because communication is kind of my strongest suit, I’m able to deal with everyone involved and able to work out schedules that pan out for us and our business, and I’m able to learn from mistakes that I see other bands make, which is one of the reasons we didn’t sign some of the contracts that were put in front of us early on in our career. There were junctures where we were offered a significant amount of money, but we would have lost a lot of rights in the process, and we’ve had a very long-term vision for this band for a really long time.

You mentioned DIY, and that’s something that fascinates me just from the perspective of how the playing field has been leveled somewhat for bands who really align themselves with that ethos. As someone who was touring and trying to garner success in the 90s pre-social media and then has continued through that surge in opportunity and availability that’s come with things like Facebook, Twitter, and Bandcamp, do you see our current social media culture as being more conducive to the DIY ethos just in terms of musicians and artists?
Yes and no. Overall, you have a lot more control over your affairs and what you’re doing, and you have a certain global reach from your home base that you didn’t have before, but you’re also competing with an ocean of noise and garbage. At the time we started, there was pretty much one band like us in each state in the country, and that was the tour circuit. People knew that if they were coming to Portland, they would contact us and we would set up the show. Which is why the first High on Fire show in Portland was with us, and the first Electric Wizard show in Portland, they played with us and slept on my floor. The first Orange Goblin show here was with us. Yob sent us a demo and came up and opened for us their first time in Portland. The first Agalloch show was opening for us, and it was because we had established ourselves as a working live band, and I knew how to contact a club and put a show together. I’d make a flyer out of stolen Dungeons and Dragons art, photocopy it, put it up around town and people would come out to the shows. [Laughs] But as much as Rob and I certainly grew up playing in bands for years before Witch Mountain and the internet, Witch Mountain’s chronology has been very contemporaneous with the internet.

Our very first time, Rob and I made an mp3 of our demo in 1999 and put it on StonerRock.com and within a month we had a record deal with an English label. It was a total mindfuck to us because here’s this new technology of “OK, here’s a compressed audio file put on the internet for someone to stream, and then here’s a record contract coming in immediately from that,” so we’ve actually tried to be very technologically savvy even from the very beginning of the band. There were tours that we did in 2001 where we had a cellphone with a dongle hooked up to a computer, and we’d be getting internet access with a dial-up connection driving down the road in a van basically. Not that we’re incredible super-tech geeks, but we definitely try to stay abreast of it and use it to our advantage.

One of the side effects that’s seemingly come from all that the Internet has given us in terms of music is this overwhelming number of very genre-specific metal bands. I mean, I could fit all of the doom metal bands on my radar from 1999 in one room, whereas now that’d be impossible. As someone who’s been involved in this scene for a very long time, is that something that you’re seeing as well where you’ve got bands aping other bands and simply working almost like a glorified cover act?
I would never begrudge anyone for being fascinated with this style of music. It’s a subgenre that’s been close to my heart for a long time, but it is unfortunate that I think a lot of people are hobbyists at it and don’t take it as seriously and are happy to make that music but not really try to work at a world class level, and I understand it’s hard to do that anymore because people have to work. People have to pay their bills, and we don’t have the sort of apprenticeship that we had in the 60s and 70s where bands were going to Hamburg and doing residencies and playing eight-hour sets six days a week. We’re victims of that as well and that’s why we’re where we’re at, and we’re in our forties. We could have been this great of a band at twenty-two had someone given us an opportunity and a check. Bands like the Who and even Metallica were becoming incredible players because they were playing nonstop all the time. Most bands now have to squeeze it in on evenings and weekends at best. I guess the point is I think it’s great so many people are interested, but I wish more of the bands were better or were interested in things that were more original. And I think a lot of people on a surface level hear slow music and think that that might be easier to do and really the opposite is true, and you can hear it. There are bands that play slow that know how to do it, and there are a lot of bands who play slow and don’t know how to do it.

That really is a misconception with doom and stoner metal where listeners often assume that there’s no virtuosity or technical skill in playing slow, but it’s absolutely the opposite because the sound is vulnerable. It’s exposed and there’s so little room for error because of the space that’s involved. That’s always been the appeal of doom metal for me–the fact that you have that bare composition where the music isn’t wound so tightly and the notes are simply exposed.
Watch Travis Foster play drums. There’s no one in the world that has a better sense of time for playing slow than that guy, and anyone that watches him on YouTube or live is gonna learn something.

Where were you in your life when music first impacted you?
Man, I could probably talk about this for hours. It’s hard to say where to start. My parents were definitely very rock-friendly people. My mom had seen Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. My dad had seen the Stooges and Blue Cheer. They saw Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk together and went to see the Rolling Stones every tour that they could, so definitely there was a lot of rock being played in my house growing up, and I have very vivid memories of running around at five-years-old with an X-Wing Fighter in my hand and rocking out to “Godzilla” by Blue Öyster Cult. That’s definitely one of the first heavy riff songs that I personally bonded with on my own, because it was on the radio constantly when I was in kindergarten and first grade. And then a few years later Metal Health by Quiet Riot, and that was the first metal record that was huge for me, and it was right around the same time as Thriller. At that time metal was arena rock music, so it was impossible for me to grow up in that area and not hear things like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Dio, and things like that. But I wouldn’t say I was self-identifying as a metalhead. I’ve always been a nerd. I’ve been passionate throughout my life about different phases, whether it was Dungeons and Dragons or comic books or Star Wars and eventually music really crept in. I played in school band, but I had really frustrating experiences with music and art teachers who didn’t understand how I wanted to be creative, and I felt very stifled by that, and I think that’s where a lot of me getting the discipline to do these things myself comes from, because the structures and stuff that they wanted to teach me didn’t work for me. I wanted to play a drumkit in a rock setting, and they wanted to put me on the xylophone. I’m very thankful to have some of that foundation, but I would have rather been sent running in the direction that I wanted to go. So basically when I was sixteen my parents helped me get my first drumset, and I started my first rock band and it was called DSL. It was LSD backwards and it stood for “Devil, Satan, Lucifer.” I’ve basically been in bands non-stop since I was sixteen. Through the course of that I went to a trade school for animation. I was doing high-end computer graphics stuff at the end of the 90s. I was pretty far ahead of the curve, and I was making a lot of money doing that, but I was constantly turning down salaried jobs because I wanted time to tour with my band, particularly Witch Mountain. The longer I’ve done this and the more people that I’ve met and traveling that I’ve gotten to do and recordings that I’ve gotten to send out into the universe–it’s just something that I get so much joy from. It’s such a sharing experience. Sitting in a cube behind a computer is not the same to me as getting to play the Hellfest in France. I don’t know. I think I’m a people person, and I’m not gonna pretend that I love booking tours or that I love dealing with all the angst of all these artists constantly, but I am good at it, and I am able to help an awful lot of people. It constantly trips me out that I was a kid that grew up on a goat farm in the woods in Oregon and didn’t’ know shit about the music industry, and now I’m on the other side of that looking down through the glass and helping pull people up to the mid-level that I am at, and yeah. It’s a pretty strange, long trip.

Obviously it’s a labor of love for you and that goes back to the earlier DIY discussion where the game has changed a great deal even compared to 10 or 15 years ago around the time Witch Mountain first started. It’s not to say that the work is any easier now but that maybe the stakes were higher if that makes sense.
Yeah, and you had to do it because you loved it. I definitely watched the whole grunge thing happen. I wore flannel shirts because they were twelve for a dollar at the Goodwill bins in Oregon, and then 1991 hits and all of a sudden my favorite band is on MTV, and I wrote them off at that time because I was eighteen and going like “Fuck. Metallica sucks now. Nirvana sucks now. Ministry sucks now. This new Voivod record sounds alternative.” So that’s really the point in time where I started going really deep into the underground and spending more time with Carcass and Sepultura and Godflesh. Just kind of chasing black metal and extreme sounds, because I wasn’t interested in corporate labels co-opting the music that I liked and hearing it get refined and streamlined. Now I’m a grown-up, and I’m a bit more pragmatic about these things, and I have a lot more sympathy for what those bands were doing, but when I was eighteen it pissed me off. It was definitely in the mid-90s where I had a real epiphany about doom metal. I’d always loved Black Sabbath, and I really fell hard for Candlemass, and then I had one experience – this one night where I listened to this St. Vitus record like four times in one night, and it just kind of dawned on me: “Wow, it’s not an accident that people are sounding this much like Black Sabbath. It’s actually like a tradition and something purposeful that a certain small amount of bands are doing.” It was 1996, and I got on a dial-up modem, and I found the Rise Above Records website and Lee Dorian had written this manifesto about doom and talked about Witchfinder General and Trouble and a few other things, and it just sort of crystallized for me. It was this sort of “Wow, this is a really small group of bands that are doing this really cool thing,” and everyone had their own little twist on it. It wasn’t like today where there’s a thousand shades of gray. At the time there was a dozen or twenty bands in the world that were making a name for themselves doing it, and it was just interesting to me that a year later I formed Witch Mountain, and now I’ve pretty much crossed paths with all those people over many years. It’s a passion play and doom was so uncool and unhip and unpopular then that you’d only do it because you wanted to do it. We weren’t looking at it in 1997 and thinking “Man, this is gonna be popular and hip in fifteen years.” [Laughs] People hated it. It was slow. It sounded retro. We were fucking loud and there were guitar solos and screaming. It was just absolutely the worst thing you could do in Portland, Oregon, in the 90s, and we didn’t give a fuck.

Not giving a fuck always seems to be the most reliable recipe for success.
Well, I’ve always preached that there’s two paths to success. There’s luck and there’s longevity. You can’t count on luck, and you can’t really create it. There’s more luck to be had if you live in New York or LA or London, and we didn’t so longevity is really the only thing we had going for us, just to keep getting better and never give up.

Speaking of that longevity, what lies ahead for Witch Mountain in light of Uta leaving?
We’ve been working really hard the last five years in particular touring and releasing records pretty non-stop. If things were peachy and Uta was sticking around, I would wanna capitalize on that momentum and keep doing that same thing, but the fact that she wants to move on is a clear signal to me that we’re gonna go through some changes, and I’m not the type to beat my head against a wall and fight it. I’m just too old at this point to go against the grain, and what the universe is telling me right now is that we’re gonna go through a metamorphosis, so I’d like to take our time and do it right. I think that there’s definitely somebody else out there that definitely has that kind of talent but also has the ambition to wanna do it, and I don’t think it’s gonna be the hardest sell in the world to say, “Hey, you wanna move to Portland, Oregon, the hippest city in the world and play in a band that’s recording and touring internationally?” [Laughs] Somewhere out there is someone that has the cajones to do that and hopefully it’s someone we get along with really well. Personality is really key for me, more so than even talent. They’re huge shoes to fill. Uta is an incredible artist, and we loved working with her, but we were around for twelve years before she joined, and this is definitely not gonna stop us, but I’m not in a hurry to just reappear in three months with somebody new. I’d rather we take our time and come back better than ever. I think Mobile is the best album we’ve ever done, but when I listen to it I don’t feel in any way that we can’t better it. We just need to put the right pieces together and come back with the next step.